Bioengineering activities in proprioceptive and robotic rehabilitation at Salvatore Maugeri Foundation

Abstract

Over the last decades, numerous and extensive research programs have been conducted in the field of robotic and proprioceptive rehabilitation. Robotic rehabilitation allows to record quantitative data about movement patterns that can help clinicians to better address the rehabilitation protocols providing information not captured using clinical measures, but the biome-chanical parameters proposed until today, to evaluate the quality of the movement are not yet standardized. Equally, the proprioception rehabilitation is known to play important roles in the planning and control of limb posture and movement. The Russian Academy of Sciences has recently developed the Regent Suit (RS), an experimental medical device derived from a suit worn by astronauts for therapeutical purposes after space flights. Although preliminary studies describe rehabilitation outcome of the RS in stroke, EMG changes induced by the suit are not known. The purpose of this paper is to review the rehabilitation activities employed at Salvatore Maugeri Foundation in the last two years, showing the main robotic and proprioceptive rehabilitation protocol developed to carefully analyse the motor strategies of the movement and of the gait in pathological conditions.